Migrating Your Application to a New Host

Before you plan the migration, it is very important to test out the application on the new environment. Some of the more painful migrations I have been involved with were a result of incomplete testing. Functionality should be tested but it is also important to put load on the new environment to ensure it can handle the expected traffic. A performance monitoring tool such as New Relic is crucial in planning your load testing strategy. In choosing endpoints to test, I like to pick a combination of controller actions that consume the most time and have the highest throughput. A performance monitoring tool can also help you decide how many concurrent users you should send at the application. Using a tool such as Apache benchmark or Blitz.io, you can ramp up to double or triple that number to figure out when or if your application reaches unacceptable performance levels.